FUTURE EVOLU'TION 229
sense of the littleness of man beside them. But why should the mountains thus depress?) Why should not their history bring us the more worthy thought of man’s mighty possibilities? For man, small in stature though he may be, is after all the flower and finish of the evolutionary process so far; he is century by century acquiring a completer mastery over Nature; and when we see how young he is beside the aged mountains, when we realise how they have only evolved by minute gradations accumulating over vast periods of time, and when we reflect that nearly similar periods may yet lie before mankind, should not our thoughts dwell rather on man’s future great- ness and on the mighty destiny which he himself may shape #
With our imagination tethered to the hard-rock fact that man has developed from a savage to a Plato and a Shakespeare, from the inventor of the stone-axe to the inventor of telegraphy in the paltry quarter million years of his existence, may we not safely give it rope to wander out into the boundless future ? We are still but children. We may be only as young bees, crawling over the combs of a hive, who have not yet found their
wings to fly out into the sun-lit world beyond. 15a
